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Fritter? What Facebook’s Opening Up Means for Twitter

Facebook has just made a bunch of significant updates today, most notably opening “up access to the content and methods for sharing through…status, Notes, Links (what we used to call Posted Items), and Video…” Not sure if you read the article awhile back over at AllFacebook, but Nick called it a few weeks back. I’m concerned that we will lose the inherent privacy that, for me, is so enjoyable.

Personally, I enjoy the two applications/services operating differently, but it was only a matter of time until Facebook realized a way to compete with Twitter in their ability to facilitate a means for instantaneous and widespread conversation. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to see a bunch of Twitter-inspired clones that will be taking up the cause clawing for their stake of the Facebook open status game.

Twitter applications like Tweetdeck, Twhirl, and the ton of other applications operating as satellites around the Twittersphere would do good to investigate and see how difficult it would be to recreate their applications displaying Facebook streams. That is if they care about being involved in a niche that is about to completely blow wide open.

Twitter has a few million users, which admittedly is on the significant rise over the last few months with all the new celebrity users, media mentions and resulting attention, but their userbase pales in comparison to Facebook’s gargantuan 150m+ users. That being said, I wonder how long until Myspace decides to jump into the fray…I’m sure that they’ll arrive fashionably late.

What do you think about this? Do you think we’ll see people jumping ship for Facebook, as there will be a completely different level of integration with all of your other Facebook data and information? Or do you think the Twitterworld will buckle down and get ready to fight the good fight? Or will this really change little for Twitter faithfuls that already sync their Facebook statuses to their Twitter posts?

Can Facebook create the same level of underground endorsement and loyal buzz with their service? Do you think Facebook will have a greater ability to capture trends because of the wider user-base and dedicated audience?

Honestly, my biggest concern is that Facebook is going to become completely overrun with marketers and as a result we’re all going to get 100x the amount of friend requests that we currently get. I enjoy keeping my Facebook friends list filled with real-life friends. Facebook, for me, is a completely private opt-in community. I share different things on Facebook that I’m less likely to talk about publicly on Twitter.

In fact, I probably only have 10 or maybe 15 people that I don’t actually know who are my friends on Facebook. This is something that potentially could ruin the Facebook experience, and turn it into Myspace all over again…sans the horrible PimpMyLayout services.

What do you think? Chime in.

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Completely agree. Who knows, perhaps this will take away more of the Twitter casual users and phishing accounts. Maybe they’ll move themselves over to Facebook because of the larger pond and easy accessibility.

Greg
I think that Marketers of the “irresponsible” kind were bound to catch on to FB eventually. FB to survive has to monetize beyond ads, as does Twitter. So these changes will happen. Twitter will most likely charge for API calls so we will probably see the smaller apps disappear. So yes, Tweetdeck for FB (Facedeck??) is a good probability as they have received their first round of funding. Not sure that I think it will be an either or situation though. FB has too much data about an individual, Twitter is the first date, FB is the second date in the Social Media relationship.
Simon

I have both a twitter and a facebook, I’ve never used twitter though, its just sitting there, but I’d use for blogging friends… My facebook, that’s for personal and real life friends and school, etc. Its really simple and easy to use, I hope it doesn’t become commercialized.

It is good to actually see someone that uses facebook to connect with real friends and not just as a medium to garner “imaginary friends” so to speak.

No offense to anyone, but I honestly think twitter is for attention seekers who don’t really have friends but just want to gather a number of followers so they can fulfill their illusions of friendship. It is too public to be for a person’s real friends. For this reason, I think twitter should only be used for companies and brands (celebrities, news anchors and co) because they need the following for the success of their brands. But the trick is to follow any of these companies or celebs effectively, you have to open a twitter account. I don’t own a twitter account to know exactly how twitter runs their ad campaigns but it seems they are using public images and companies to attract their fanbase to their site, and I don’t think this is such a good thing for advertising unlike facebook where the users are already present and the companies come to them.

I know it is easier for me to subscribe to an application on a social network I already use than it is for me to open another social network account.

If I’m gonna compare facebook and twitter which are both useful for social media marketing, I will choose facebook because in facebook you can filter those users who are really interested in your updates but I guess in twitter there is also a process to do that but I didn’t know that yet, so I still go on with facebook. I use twitter sometimes.